By Clayton Herring
It is the end of the year and time for a little retrospection.
History was made in December 1979 when a Jewish man hosted a half hour Christmas television special broadcast in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. This was unusual. A Jewish man on television proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah. The local television station liked what they saw and asked Zola Levitt to come to their studios and produce a weekly program, which he was able to do with the help of his Christian friend Kenneth Berg.
The program that began as “Zola Levitt Live” then changed it name to “Zola Levitt Presents” after a couple of years, mainly because the program was being recorded and not live like Zola’s local radio program had been. This curious little program caught the attention of the fledgling Christian Broadcasting Network. CBN sought to be one of the first religious networks utilizing (what was then) the latest technological advancement in television distribution — Cable! No longer were viewers restricted to watching only the three TV networks broadcast in their area. Now, cable subscribers had access to over 70 different channels.
Zola Levitt brought Christianity through Jewish Eyes to Gentile church goers as well as a small, very quiet group of religious Jewish people. After almost 27 years as host, the Lord called Zola called home in 2006. The television program continued on with different hosts: Sandra Levitt, Dr. Jeffrey Seif, and later Myles and Katharine Weiss, yet the name of the program remained “Zola Levitt Presents.” Everyone involved with the program wanted to continue to honor Zola but as time went on, the need to change the name became more apparent.
In 2010, Dr. Jeffrey Seif and I went to the National Religious Broadcasters convention. Attending a convention like this is an opportunity to meet face to face (remember that?) with our distribution outlets and other ministries. One afternoon, Jeff and I headed back to the convention room floor when we bumped into someone Jeff knew personally — Jonathan Bernis. If you don’t know who that is, let’s just say he is the leader of a sister ministry. After exchanging pleasantries and before we had to go our separate ways, Jonathan asked Jeff, “Are you still working on the program named after someone else?” I don’t believe Jonathan was being rude or disrespectful, but was acknowledging the obvious. It was no longer Zola Levitt doing the “presenting.” No matter how hard it was going to be, ultimately a name change had to be made, but we remained reluctant.
It took another ten years before we finally did it.
The last program of “Zola Levitt Presents” aired at the end of December with Dr. Jeffrey Seif along with David and Kirsten Hart. The first week of January 2020 saw the same people in the studio but now the name of the program was “Our Jewish Roots.” By focusing on what was arguably one of the most important aspects of Zola’s ministry (the Jewish Roots of the Christian faith), we could continue the legacy Zola began almost 42 years ago and take it into the future.
As you probably know, we have expanded beyond television and our monthly news magazine (still called The Levitt Letter), by creating pages and channels on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Now this curious little program can be seen by anyone with access to the Internet, which means almost the whole world.
Even though 2020 was a strange and difficult year, we look forward to the future because we know Who is in control and HIS Name is above all names!